Towards an ABM-Based Framework for Investigating Consumer Behaviour in the Insurance Industry

This paper presents a framework that builds upon agent-based modelling for investigating the behaviour of consumers in the insurance industry. Consumers are modelled as agents and clustered in groups reflecting their income levels. Agents that model consumers are characterised by their socio-demographic features and interact with other insurance consumer-agents by means of local and global social networks. Furthermore, the environment in which they evolve models the impact of external factors such as mortality, disease and other accident rates as well as insurance culture. This makes that consumer-agents accumulate experience, improve their understanding and knowledge of financial products, and thus develop their perception of need for security and consider the usefulness of insurance services. In turn, the framework enables to model the construction of the customers’ insurance product purchase decision.p

Assessment of the Flue Gas Recycle Strategies on Oxy-Coal Power Plants using an Exergy-based Methodology

A presentation of this paper was given at the 16th Conference on Process Integration, Modelling and Optimisation for Energy Saving and Pollution Reduction, Rodes(Greece) 29 September- 2 October 2013This article is available online at http://www.aidic.it/cet/13/35/057.pdfInternational audienceWhile oxy-combustion CO2 capture was foreseen to have higher improvement potential than post-combustion a decade ago, research has not been carried out at the same pace since then and today, the latter exhibits higher technological maturity along with low energy penalty thanks to advanced process integration and solvents formulation. Thus, significant efficiency improvement is needed for the oxy-combustion route to be competitive with post-combustion for carbon capture on coal-fired power plants. In order to achieve such improvements, process integration at system level is required to assess the true energy savings potential of oxy-combustion. In this study, an exergy-based methodology is performed to compare various flue gas recirculation strategies on a state-of-the-art 1100 MWe gross oxy-fired power plant. Exergy analysis at unit operation level allows the identification of the location and the magnitude of the thermodynamic irreversibilities occurring in the process, leading to an enhanced understanding of the studied system. In addition to the reference case in which the secondary recycle is fully depolluted and dehydrated; three alternative flue gas recirculation options have been investigated. Among the studied strategies, recirculation of the secondary flow prior the regenerative heat exchanger with a high temperature particle removal device leads to the highest net plant efficiency. This option not only allows the minimal exergy losses in the boiler but also minimizes the flowrate going through the downstream depollution devices. The net plant efficiency obtained for this architecture is 38.0%LHV, which represents a 3% increase compared to the reference oxy-combustion plant. Comparing this figure to an air-fired power plant modeled with the same set of hypotheses, the energy penalty is 8.1%-pts

Towards Second Generation Oxy-pulverized Coal Power Plants: Energy Penalty Reduction Potential of Pressurized Oxy-combustion Systems

AbstractDuring the last decade, CO2 capture on coal power plants has been the subject of sustained attention as one of the most credible way to drastically reduce anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions. Significant reduction in the energy penalty related to the oxy- combustion routes has been achieved but uncertainties remain in the operation of such a process inducing major modifications of the power island. In this context, for oxy-combustion, and more generally carbon capture to become a reality, its energy penalty shall be drastically reduced. In that perspective, cutting edge strategies allowing taking full advantage of oxy-fired operation have to be investigated. Among them, boiler pressurization has been identified as one of the most promising solution. Two major pressurized oxy-combustion concepts have emerged in literature: the flameless combustion technology (ISOTHERM®) and the staged-pressurized oxy-combustion (SPOC) concept. According to the authors describing those two processes, whilst very different in the combustion temperature control strategy, they both succeed in allowing pressurized operation.In this work, those two concepts have been compared to an air-fired, a conservative and optimized atmospheric oxy-fired power plants in terms of energy performances. The reason underlying below the observed differences, have been determined using exergy analysis. The SPOC process leads to significantly lower energy penalty, as low as 3.8%-pts compared to the ISOTHERM® concepts which lead to performance in the same order of magnitude than the optimized atmospheric design. It has been highlighted that this difference is essentially due to the large flue gas recycling requirement for the latter concept to control combustion temperature

Design of multimedia processor based on metric computation

Media-processing applications, such as signal processing, 2D and 3D graphics rendering, and image compression, are the dominant workloads in many embedded systems today. The real-time constraints of those media applications have taxing demands on today's processor performances with low cost, low power and reduced design delay. To satisfy those challenges, a fast and efficient strategy consists in upgrading a low cost general purpose processor core. This approach is based on the personalization of a general RISC processor core according the target multimedia application requirements. Thus, if the extra cost is justified, the general purpose processor GPP core can be enforced with instruction level coprocessors, coarse grain dedicated hardware, ad hoc memories or new GPP cores. In this way the final design solution is tailored to the application requirements. The proposed approach is based on three main steps: the first one is the analysis of the targeted application using efficient metrics. The second step is the selection of the appropriate architecture template according to the first step results and recommendations. The third step is the architecture generation. This approach is experimented using various image and video algorithms showing its feasibility